Water scarcity in an increasingly uncertain world can have a huge impact on businesses and individuals. Significant effects include loss of economic opportunity and time. Such effects can influence an individual, residential homes, food and entertainment, catering, restaurants, gyms, real estate, facilities management, apartment owners, commercial and industrial businesses, insurance, among others. Other effects include: reduction on farm productivity, thereby affecting agri-business; ill health, thereby impacting hospitals and schools; and poor hygiene. Moreover, the risk of not having water can have wider and far reaching impacts.
Water scarcity risks trigger more chronic impacts in resource-constrained regions like Africa. Water scarcity manifests a range of risks that have varying levels of importance to different end users and consumer. Both individual behavior (water usage) and the external context (supply reliability) determine water scarcity risk. Individual behavior may mitigate or exacerbate water scarcity. For example, purchasing a water storage tank when supply is intermittent reduces the risk of suffering an economic loss from reduced or otherwise stopping crop productivity.
Variability is introduced in the external context via factors such as: management competency and infrastructure insufficiency leading to intermittent supply from municipal piped water systems; variable population growth via uncontrolled urbanization; recharge potential of the natural groundwater system; and rainfall variability in timing and intensity. Such factors greatly complicate the water usage, leading to uncertainty among the stakeholders.
It is desirable to make use of the growing deployment of Internet connected devices and machines (such as the Internet of Things (IoT)), embedded devices, sensors, applications, and middleware in the area of water usage. Allowing distributed devices to instrument water points, creating digital aquifers, digital lakes, digital rivers, etc.
Water points have long been instrumented or monitored and analysed, manually, to determine availability and quality of water resources. However, the impact to businesses and individuals caused by the unpredictability and reliability of water supply remains unmonitored and unknown.